Dr. Whitaker was still sleeping. His dark lashes were curved crescent moons above his cheekbones. His foot poked out of the blankets, splinted and elevated, carefully resting in its bone box sling.
His chest rose and fell, lifting the counterpane with each breath. He had been changed into a night shirt, the neck loose and open. Lottie could not stop herself from staring at the bit of chest exposed there. The curve of a muscle. The sparse sprinkling of hair. The image rose of that same chest, bare and arcing in pain.
It all felt piercingly intimate.
She remembered the steel-eyed man she had dined with just two days past. The man who had listened to her and defended her so forthrightly.
She sensed that Dr. Whitaker would not be pleased to know she had seen him like this—comatose and helpless. But hewasa cousin, as Grandmère had said. There was no great impropriety in Lottie being here, particularly with the maid present.
Was his face less drawn, less pale than the night before?
It was hard to say.
She placed a hand on his forehead. He was warm. Not alarmingly so, but his mild fever remained.
Lottie frowned and sat beside his bed.
Perhaps . . .
Perhaps, she would keep the maid company.
Lottie spent thenext three days at Dr. Whitaker’s bedside.
Honestly, what else was she to do, aside from expire of boredom?
It was January. In rural Wiltshire.
Social engagements were thin on the ground. Besides, she could hardly call upon neighbors without Grandmère. And Grandmère rarely left her rooms, except to complain about the cold weather and lack of company.
Moreover, the doctor’s bedchamber was by far the warmest place in the house at the moment. Lottie was simply being economical.
Hour after hour, she sat at Dr. Whitaker’s bedside.
In keeping with the fey feeling of the room, she had retrieved Grandmère’s well-loved copy ofContes Nouveaux ou Les Fées à la Mode—or in English,New Tales, or Fairies in Fashion.
There were plenty of weightier tomes she could be reading, but the book was a long-time favorite and one she knew the maid would enjoy. And, as it featured tales of fantastical creatures in outlandish settings, Lottie deemed it fitting for the circumstances.
She began with the story ofFinette Cendron, an earlier version of the English Cinderella, reading it aloud, translating from French as she went. The maid gasped and sighed in all the correct places, offering commentary about the horridness of Cendron’s wicked sisters and the romance of the prince searching for his lost Cendron.
Dr. Whitaker, of course, slept through it all. To be sure, he stirred from time to time, but it was only to open his gray eyes and look at her, unfocused and bleary. He ate little, the laudanum sapping his appetite. His mild fever remained, neither worsening nor improving.
It was oddly captivating to watch him sleep. As a gently-reared young woman, Lottie had scarcely ever witnessed a man in slumber. Only her father snoozing in the library or Gabriel napping on the drawing room sofa.
But even though the doctor was a cousin, it was nothing alike.
She felt like a cartographer, mapping the planes of Dr. Whitaker’s face—noting the fluttering movements of his eyes behind his closed lids, the twitch of his mouth, the occasional murmured word.
She could watch him for hours.
Heavens, shedidwatch him for hours as she read.
Dr. Smithson called and declared that all was going as well as could be hoped. Lottie left the room as he and a footman changed Dr. Whitaker’s bandages and saw to his needs. There was no sign of infection—the mild fever being a signal that his body was healing. Both good developments. Dr. Whitaker simply needed to eat to keep his strength up and continue to take laudanum for another couple of days.
After Dr. Smithson left, Lottie moved from Cendron toLe Serpentin VertorThe Green Dragon. Fitting, she supposed, to read about a cursed dragon while tending to a wounded one.
Not that Dr. Whitaker would ever realize that fact.
The Green Dragonwas a lengthy tale, vaguely similar to Sleeping Beauty but with all the various bits of the story mixed up. In this version, the princess, Laidronette, was cursed with ugliness. She eventually meets a green dragon with fiery eyes who invites her into his home, and they fall in love. The dragon is, of course, a prince in disguise who sees beyond Laidronette’s cursed ugliness to the beauty inside.
